Yemen’s current political crisis has been framed in terms of sectarian conflict and state failure. Causal arrows are said to point in both directions: either the state has so thoroughly failed in its basic functions that people have been compelled to “retreat” to prior sectarian loyalties, or else sectarian loyalties have been mobilized to undermine the state. By either account, the rise of the Huthis as Zaydi Islamists, their shift from the spatial and sociocultural periphery to Yemen’s center, and their conflict with members of the Islamist Islah party are offered as evidence of cause or effect. What both explanations fail to account for is the discursive and institutional misrecognition that undergirds the current conflict. As Islamists, both Huthis and Islahis have adopted substantively republican political commitments, but Islamist republicanism departs from existing regional and global Northern discourses regarding state-society relations in the Gulf, in particular. For members of the Gulf Cooperation Council, the republican demands of both Huthis and Islahis challenge the legitimacy of monarchical regimes. For Americans and Europeans, the Islamism of both movements is in critical tension with the expectation that republicanism align with secular institutions. Together, these departures have made Islamist republicanism –particularly its cross-sectarian features – illegible. This has allowed Gulf and Northern actors to advance a transitional framework in Yemen that has undermined ideological convergence and fueled conflict. In other words, international actors have initiated a process rooted in neither sectarian animus nor state failure, but one that has been arguably productive of both. Based on interviews and participant observation among partisan and independent Yemeni youth activists, as well as analysis of texts and speeches produced by a range of relevant institutions, this paper maps the substantive ideological convergence between Ansar Allah, the political wing of the Huthi movement, and Islah. It identifies central republican precepts that help to explain the participation of large numbers of both group’s members in the 2011 Yemeni uprising. The paper then examines the key transitional institutions crafted according to the GCC framework and, using Bourdieu’s notion of misrecognition, identifies ways in which institutions (and the discourses that have framed and justified them) systematically undermined the practical ability of Islamists to act upon their shared commitments and advance the republican principles around which they converge.